"It's always a slightly unnerving proposition when a mainstream literary author takes an unexpected sidestep into science fiction, having shown no previous tendencies in that direction...

"There's also the danger that the author doesn't fully understand SF - where it comes from, how it works, what it's for. Then he or she will make a half-hearted stab at it, as if idly scratching an itch (Philip Roth's counterfactual The Plot Against America ), or botch it altogether (Paul Theroux's turgid satire on consumerism, O-Zone ), or, perhaps worst of all, hit upon some concept that to him or her seems new and revolutionary but to even the most casual SF reader is old hat - a case, one might say, of reinventing the warp drive. For instance, critics in the literary pages lionised Martin Amis for the time-in-reverse conceit of Time's Arrow , while SF greybeards sighed and pointed out that, as is so often the case, Philip K. Dick did it first (in Counter-Clock World ) and did it better." - James Lovegrove, reviewing Toby Litt's new novel Journey Into Space, which I'm now dying to get my hands on.